Johns Hopkins University is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland, founded in 1876. Its AI-related work is distributed across several units rather than concentrated in one center: the Data Science and AI Institute on the Homewood campus, the School of Government and Policy, the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, the Center for Health Security within the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Whiting School of Engineering, and the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), a university-affiliated research center serving defense and national-security sponsors.
Data Science and AI Institute
The Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute describes itself as an interdisciplinary institute for education, research, and translation of "trustworthy AI and data-driven discovery," with stated coverage of machine learning and AI systems "and their risks" across neuroscience, precision medicine, climate resilience and sustainability, public-sector innovation, and the social sciences and humanities (Source: ai.jhu.edu).
The institute is built on a stated commitment to 80 new tenure-track faculty in data science and AI, 30 new endowed chairs under the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships program with joint appointments across divisions, a projected 30 scientific staff members and research software engineers, and more than 1,000 graduate students, undergraduates and postdoctoral researchers engaged through training and research. It also names new academic buildings on the Homewood campus and computational infrastructure, and describes partnerships with the School of Medicine, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, collaborative research awards and fellowships with the Applied Physics Laboratory, and the university's School of Government and Policy (Source: ai.jhu.edu).
AI governance and alignment research
Gillian K. Hadfield holds the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship of AI Alignment and Governance, with joint appointments in the School of Government and Policy and the Department of Computer Science in the Whiting School; the appointment was announced in June 2025 (Source: hub.jhu.edu). She is the originator, with Jack Clark, of the regulatory-markets proposal set out in Regulatory Markets: The Future of AI Governance, and lead author of the normative-competence research agenda in Building AI for the Democratic Matrix: A Technical Research Agenda for Normative Competence and Normative Institutions (Hadfield + Trivedi + Hadfield-Menell, Knight Columbia, March 3 2026). She is also a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute.
Seth Lazar is Professor at the School of Government and Policy and principal investigator of the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory (MINT) Lab, which he founded at the Australian National University and which relocated with him to Johns Hopkins (Source: mintresearch.org). His work on anticipatory AI ethics and on the political philosophy of algorithmic power is set out in Anticipatory AI Ethics (Lazar, Knight Columbia, May 1 2026).
Henry Farrell is SNF Agora Professor of International Affairs at SAIS and an SNF Agora Institute affiliate. His essay with Cosma Shalizi, "AI as Social Technology", published by the Knight First Amendment Institute in May 2026, treats large language models as social rather than cognitive technologies.
Both the Hadfield and Lazar appointments route substantial AI-governance research through the School of Government and Policy, a unit the Data Science and AI Institute names as a partner for applying data to questions of democracy and evidence-based policy (Source: ai.jhu.edu).
Biosecurity
The Center for Health Security, in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, is the university's principal voice on AI and biological risk. Thomas V. Inglesby and Moritz S. Hanke published the Science Perspective "AI-designed viral genomes" on August 6, 2026, alongside the first reported AI-designed bacteriophage genomes (Generative design of bacteriophages with genome language models), stating that "the ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not." Inglesby was also among the life-sciences signatories to the ScreenDNA letter. The Center's position is a central strand in AI Biosecurity, where it sits opposite the developers of Evo 2 (Arc Institute / NVIDIA) — a model whose author list includes Johns Hopkins affiliates alongside the Arc Institute, NVIDIA, Stanford and others (Genome modelling and design across all domains of life with Evo 2).
Security and cryptography research
Cryptographer Matthew Green was the first to document, in May 2026, that the encrypted reasoning blocks returned by commercial model APIs are portable outside their original context and can be replayed out of order or across sessions, and reported that providers did not acknowledge "any security implications arising from side channels or replay attacks" — a finding later extended to cross-user and cross-model portability by Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs. See Encrypted Reasoning Traces.
Applied Physics Laboratory
The Applied Physics Laboratory is one of four national-laboratory-tier sites named for initial projects under Microsoft's $60 million commitment to the Genesis Mission announced on July 22, 2026, alongside Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Idaho National Laboratory (Source: blogs.microsoft.com).
Alumni and prior affiliations
Jared Kaplan, co-founder and chief science officer of Anthropic, trained as a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins and was on its faculty; the scaling-laws paper Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models carries his Johns Hopkins affiliation alongside OpenAI.
Naming
The institution is "Johns Hopkins," after founder Johns Hopkins, not "John Hopkins"; the abbreviation "SAIS" refers to its School of Advanced International Studies and is not a separate institution.
Relationships
- related: Gillian K. Hadfield, Seth Lazar, Henry Farrell, Jared Kaplan — faculty and alumni whose AI-policy work is anchored here.
- related: AI Biosecurity — via the Center for Health Security.
- related: Encrypted Reasoning Traces — via Matthew Green's disclosure.
- supports: AI-designed viral genomes, Regulatory Markets: The Future of AI Governance, AI as Social Technology (Farrell + Shalizi, Knight Columbia, May 11 2026) — publications by Johns Hopkins faculty.
- deploys-in: Genesis Mission — APL as a named Genesis Mission project site.
- related: Vector Institute — joint affiliation through Hadfield's CIFAR chair.